One Quarter Of America Lives In A High-Poverty Neighborhood

"Monday’s Census Bureau report estimates that 25.7 percent of the country lived amid concentrated poverty in 2010. The figure looks even worse in context: the previous decade had shown a nearly 2 percentage point drop in the share of Americans living in impoverished neighborhoods. The 2000 Census reported that 18.1 percent of Americans lived in poverty areas, a drop from 20 percent in the 1990 survey."

"The report notes that the population of poverty areas is “more demographically diverse than in the past.” The share of the white population living in poverty areas jumped substantially, from 11.3 percent to 20.3 percent. But non-white Americans are still overrepresented: Black people made up 12.3 percent of the population in 2010, but are 24.2 percent of those living in poverty areas."

" The concentration of poverty hurts the other three-quarters of the country too, in subtler ways. Because people in poverty areas are less able to reach their potential, the country as a whole is less able to reap the economic and cultural rewards that would come from those people’s success. "

It is not just inner city neighborhoods and remote mountain regions were poverty is highly concentrated. A rapidly increasing number of both urban neighborhoods outside the inner city core and aging first ring suburbs are also experiencing concentrated poverty and all the problems associated with it. Even wealthier outer ring suburbs are showing signs of distress as poverty rates inch up in those growing communities. Eventually poverty is going to be evenly distributed everywhere.